Poetry

Handsome is as handsome does

Handsome is as handsome does

Jody's Notes

Maybe I'm being too hard on myself. But this poem strikes me as not quite managing it. The imagery is a little too consciously constructed--the conceits are a little too straightforward. It strikes me as a little too easy to come up with, not difficult enough to think up. Not clever enough or deep enough or original enough. Even though otherwise it's fine.

I wasn't being glib when I wrote: maybe I'm being hard on myself. Because, after all, any impression (by an author) that an image is too easy to come up with is due to that author's impression of how original the image is (in the context of the author's other ideas) . But the real question is not how easy the image is for an author but instead how easy (how fresh) the image is for other people.

And that's very hard for an author to determine: how fresh, how easy, etc., an image is for other people, even other people who read a lot of poetry.